


Home Again

by ishouldwritethatdown



Series: Souls Entangled [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Celebratory Waffles, El & Will Are Supernaturally Connected, Family Feels, Gap Filler, Multi, POV Multiple, Parent-Child Relationship, Post-Closing the Gate, Psychic Bond, Referenced past child abuse, References to Addiction, Season Finale, Sleepovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 00:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19896550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: The much-anticipated first official meeting of Will Byers and Eleven Hopper happens after a long, exhausted drive home from Hawkins Lab where the Gate has just been sewed shut by the incredible power of a twelve-year-old's determination to live. Two kids who refuse to be broken by a world that seems to want them suffering - it's like their souls are forged from the same stardust. And no one's going to be able to separate them from each other again.





	Home Again

**Author's Note:**

> Did you guys know the Hoppers' bathroom has a sliding folding door? Because I sure didn't until I watched the set tour to get a good idea of the house's layout for this fic.

“Okay, kiddo,” he sniffed, pocketing the handkerchief smeared with her blood so that he could forget about it and let it go through the wash in his jeans sometime in the next couple weeks. “You ready to go home?”

“Home,” El agreed, and tried to get to her feet.

“No no no no,” he said, and scooped her up into his arms. “Don’t even try it. You’ll fall down and knock your head before we reach the car. Just hold tight, okay?”

And the kid must’ve really been tired, because she didn’t argue. She didn’t even insist on being put on her own feet (grounded, in control, potentially intimidating with the right glare) when they reached Owens on the stairs.

“You still alive, Doc?”

The doctor started awake when Hopper tapped his leg with his toe, and stared up at them, wide-eyed. “Holy shit,” he let slip, obviously surprised to see them leaving the building with all the pieces of themselves they came in with.

“Watch the language around the kid, please,” Hop said, mostly as a joke, because given the slightest provocation El would likely loose a string of profanity so disgusting that half the men he’d served with would be shocked. She had learned most of the words from Hopper’s own mouth, and he did feel some small amount of shame about that. Probably not enough. “I’m gonna drop you at the station, someone can call you an ambulance from there. I’d take you all the way to the hospital, but, well…” he thought about it. “I’ll be honest, I’m way too tired to come up with a polite lie. Getting my daughter home is more important.”

Owens flicked a glance between the two of them, and he felt El’s silent, speaking eyes on him. _What did you say?_

Whoops. He said the ‘D’ word. Maybe it was the exhaustion, but that didn’t seem like as much of a big deal as he thought it ought’ve. Like it didn’t quite qualify as a mistake.

In the car, with El eased as gently as possible into the passenger side and Owens slightly less gently helped into the back, his own ass parked firmly in the driver’s seat, he put the walkie to his mouth. “Alright, everyone. Gate’s closed. We’re both safe. What’s the damage? sound off.” There was a beat of silence that he used to put the car in reverse and turn around. The sooner they got off this lot, the better. Too many nightmares attached to this place. For all of them.

“Yeah, uh, we’re all good,” said the little goofy one – Henderson, he was pretty sure – and Hop tried not to roll his eyes at the way the boy was either consciously or subconsciously deepening his voice to make himself sound more grown up. “I mean, uh, Steve has a concussion, we’re pretty sure—"

Overlapping, in the background with a slight slur, “I’m _fine_ , Henderson—"

“—and Billy—Billy is still passed out at Will’s house, I think.”

_Who the hell is Billy?_

_What the hell do you mean you’re not still at the Byers’ place?_

“We’re good here,” said the Wheeler girl, before he could ask those questions (not that he particularly wanted to know the answers).

“Is Will alright?” the Sinclairs’ eldest asked hurriedly, before Hopper could acknowledge her response. From the scuffling and muttering in the background, he had snatched the radio out of Henderson’s hands.

“Yeah. Yeah, he’s okay. He’s awake, he’s talking – he’s himself again.” And it was a good thing Nancy was there with them, because Hopper was pretty sure none of the Byers would be up for stringing coherent sentences together at the moment.

He resisted the urge to run his hand down his face. _Watch the road, Hop._ “Alright, Nancy, I need you to find out where your brother and his friends ended up and go pick them up. Can you do that?”

“Yeah, I can do that. Lucas, hit me with the directions.”

She asked Sinclair before her brother?

It made sense when the kid started rattling off a route off the top of his head given the vague address of the cabin. Nancy had been forced to put up with these kids for years, of course she knew which of them could visualise a map at the drop of a hat.

“Uh, Chief?” Jonathan. Shaky, no doubt about it, but holding it together. Tough kid. “You want Nancy to drop us off at home, first? We came in my car…”

“No,” said El, snapping to attention. He almost flinched, surprised that she was still awake.

Hopper glanced at her. She definitely had something different on her mind than he had; the presence of a passed-out teenager apparently at the Byers house was at the forefront of his mind. He should probably deal with that now, but… Eh. It was Tomorrow-Hop’s problem. He could already feel Tomorrow-Hop throwing curses at him. “Nah, you guys stay where you are. We’ll come to you.”

“Chief, what the fuck,” said the solitary deputy at the station when he led Owens and his limp inside and turned around to leave without even the whiff of an explanation. Apparently, Callaghan had been persuaded into taking the night shift for the first time on the promise that it would be uneventful.

Hopper pulled smoke from his cigarette and sighed it out. Sweet, sweet nicotine. It never felt so good to be choking to death. “See you in the morning,” he called. “Probably.”

“Wha’do I tell the EMTs?” he demanded.

“Use your initiative, deputy!”

* * *

“Mom,” Will said, squirming.

“Nope. Never letting you go. Ever. Not for a second.”

“Mom, please let me go shower. I feel so gross.”

She supposed that was probably allowed. Still didn’t want to let go of him. “Alright, but if you feel lightheaded at all, sit straight down, and…”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. Took a slightly unsteady breath, and repeated with a courageous smile, “I’m gonna be fine.”

She believed him. He’d always been good at that; making the things he said come alive, feel real. Joyce tried not to eavesdrop on the kids’ Dungeons games too much, because she didn’t want to embarrass them. But hearing Will describe this made-up world so vividly that the other boys just stared at him, enchanted, was a source of great and secret pride for her. _My boy_ , she’d say, _is an amazing storyteller_.

Will eased the bathroom door closed, keeping his eye on the main room as long as he could with a reassuring smile – like when he had had to leave Chester alone in the house, minimising down to the second the amount of time that he would be out of his dog’s field of view. Saying, _I’m coming back, don’t worry._ She used to make that same face, when he was really little, when he was sick and bedridden and she had to leave his room to go to the kitchen or the bathroom. _I’m not going far. I won’t be gone long_.

And she knew that – she _knew_ he was only in the next room, but even with a mere wall between them, the fact that she couldn’t see him made her anxious. It was like when he came back from that place – what was it the kids called it? The topsy-turvy? – all over again.

“Mom, are you okay?” Her eldest was staring at her, mortal worry tracing his face. “What’s wrong?”

She put her arm around him, and felt him shivering; not from the cold, although it wasn’t quite volcanic in the house anymore, with the heaters off and the door cracked open. “I’m just tired,” she told him, and that was true. All the kinds of tired you could be rolled into one, she thought.

Headlights swung past the windows and they heard a car pull up to the drive. There was a clutch of dread in the _What now?_ variety before she remembered whose house she was sitting in, and got to her feet to open the door for them just as Hop’s footsteps _clunked_ onto the porch. She reached for him, and he stepped over the threshold and let her fall in to his chest. His arms were warm, not the stifling heat that killed monsters, but toasty like a winter’s night survived. And they _had_ survived, all of them except for…

She squeezed tighter, buried her face in closer, and tried not to choke. “Oh, Hop…”

His hands were gentle on her back. His voice matched them. “You alright?”

She pulled away and nodded, wiping her nose. “Yeah… yeah, we’re okay.” _We_ will _be okay. Eventually._ Not tonight, and probably not for a few more weeks. But they _would_ be. Eventually. They’d just have to be.

“Where is he?”

El’s footsteps had been so quiet, Joyce almost jumped seeing her a half-step behind Hopper, searching the cabin with her eyes.

“He’s just in the shower, honey, he—he’ll be out in a minute,” she told her.

When Jonathan had asked Hopper if he wanted Nancy to take them home, Will had snapped suddenly to attention: _No._ She’d been worried, and meant to ask him why not, but hadn’t. It wasn’t an urgent concern, after Hop told them to sit tight. But she’d made a mental note to ask him why he didn’t want to go home – they’d talked, after he’d come back from hospital last year, about whether or not Hawkins was still home, or if they might want to go somewhere else where they weren’t tangled up in bad memory. Will had wanted to stay with his friends and what he knew, so they stayed. If that had changed now, well… they didn’t have a lot of money to spare at the moment, but if they were careful and lucky, they could manage it.

But seeing El’s face, and the way she seemed to resist a pull to the bathroom door, Joyce wondered if she hadn’t had the same reaction to Jonathan’s suggestion. _Will just didn’t want to leave without seeing El._ And that explanation seemed to make an intrinsic sort of sense, despite the fact that nobody had told Will that El was back. El said that she’d seen Will when he was sick – maybe that sight worked both ways?

“Are you okay?” Joyce reached out to touch El’s arm while Hopper closed the door behind them.

El nodded seriously. There was still a slight smear of blood around her nose that hadn’t been totally wiped away. She’d opened the Gate, and now she’d closed it. Mistake fixed. World saved. And yet there was still a fear in her eyes, of failure and of rejection. What if she didn’t close it good enough? What if Papa got angry?

Joyce pulled her close. She’d got so much taller in a year, and she was more fierce than ever with the dark shadows painted around her eyes, but she was still that scared little girl. “You’re so incredibly brave,” she whispered. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Okay,” Hop said minutes later, after flipping through the cupboards and fridge to an audience of three. “We’ve got enough Eggos for two each, or two gigantic stacks of five.”

“Uh, I’m alright, Chief,” Jonathan coughed, trying not to snicker.

“Yeah, me too,” Joyce said, catching his smile. “Thanks, though, Hop.”

He raised his eyebrows at El and said, “Lucky break, kid. You and Will get the five-stacks. What’s he like on his waffles?”

“Syrup,” El said, as Joyce’s mouth opened to say the same. It turned into an impolite gape that she shut hastily, and nodded when Hopper looked to her for confirmation.

“Alright, help me get it ready,” he gestured to El, and she sprung off the bed, exhaustion replaced by eagerness for sweets. With their apparent connection, Joyce was surprised Will hadn’t jumped out of the shower already, anticipating waffles.

“Oh, shoot,” she cursed. Jonathan, El, and Hopper all looked at her with questioning expressions. At least none of them panicked; if the real swear words weren’t coming out, it probably wasn’t as severe as the rest of their day. Still, they were allowed to worry about little things now. They’d earned that. “I didn’t bring Will any fresh clothes.”

She saw Hopper and El exchange a glance, and he made a subtle nodding motion before he looked at Joyce again. “Don’t worry about it. He can borrow some of El’s, okay?”

_She told him that with a look?_

But of course she did. Because didn’t she know every eye-roll that her boys gave her, every kind of silence and every tone of voice? Hopper had spent almost a full year learning how to listen to El, and she’d spent a full year learning how to speak to him. Watching them move together in their own space, Joyce thought that they could’ve fooled her; if she didn’t know them, she’d have thought they’d been father and daughter for years.

* * *

Will heard the door slide back a little, letting his fog of steam escape. Maybe he’d gone a little overboard with the heat, but it was cleansing. Washing every trace of the Mind-Flayer from his skin until it went pruney. He'd flinched against the stab of pain in his side when his hand ran over it, but took a deep breath and tried to ignore it. It would settle. He'd... get used to it. What was one more scar?

He heard his mom speak from the entrance to the bathroom, through the gap she’d made. “Will, sweetie, I’m leaving you some clothes and a towel just inside the door. Hop and El said you could borrow them.”

_Eleven is here._

“Okay, thanks, Mom,” he said, and heard the door slide shut again.

Not that his mom had _said_ El was here, exactly, but he knew she was. He’d felt it, in that second that the door opened, distracting him from hot watery bliss. All that separated them now was one measly door that could be pushed back with one fatigue-weakened hand. Not so complicated a barrier as the walls between dimensions or the barricade that unconsciousness had made.

He wasn’t even sure how he knew that El had visited him while he was sleeping. He just did.

He cranked the faucet closed on the shower and pulled back the curtain, wrapping the towel around his shoulders before he could begin to shiver. He tugged the clothes out of neatly folded squares and considered them carefully. _Girl clothes_. These were girl clothes. They were dark blues and medium greys, a tee and sweatpants and a pullover, but they belonged to a girl. What would the others say? What would the kids at school say? What would _Dad_ say?

Will towelled his hair aggressively, shaking his head and letting those thoughts be absorbed away from him. It didn’t matter what Dad would say. Dad wasn’t _here_. Dad wouldn’t ever know. And Dad didn’t know El.

Dad didn’t know El would kick his ass. He grinned.

Pulling on soft, freshly laundered clothes, he breathed in and sighed. Cleanliness. Warmth.

_Safe._

Oh. He hadn’t really felt safe in a while, had he?

He picked up his hospital gown with finger and thumb and slid open the bathroom door. Mom and Jonathan were the first faces he saw, still sitting on the bed that had been pulled into the front room. “Um, what should I do with this?” he asked, holding it up.

“Here,” said Hopper, startling him slightly as he moved fully into view from the kitchen, holding out his hand. He passed the gown to the Chief, and he disappeared around the corner again. He heard a crinkling sound and then plastic-on-plastic as the bin lid swung shut.

It was only then that his eyes fell on the girl sitting at the table. Her dark hair looked wet and was spiked around awkwardly while it tried to curl in places, and black makeup was smudged around her eyes. Juxtaposed to that were the baby blue pyjamas she was dressed in, and the array of colourful sundae toppings arranged around her on the table. He found himself walking closer, and she stood, mirroring him, until they stopped in front of each other and stared. Her finger twitched at the same time his hand began to lift, and they met in the middle and just entwined their fingers. Tangible, warm, not a ghost on the other side of a dark, shuddering wall.

“Will,” she said, and _there_ was El, hand in his. Her nervous voice telling him that everything was going to be alright, his mom _promised_ , and she promised too, and a promise was something that you could never ever break.

“El,” he beamed, and the smile quickly lighted her face, too. It felt like a reunion between best friends, like coming home, and he was pretty sure that it wasn’t just because Mike and Lucas and Dustin had talked about her so much that he felt like he knew her already. Because she knew _him_ , too, and it was almost like in being separated into different worlds, they had found a different barrier to break down.

The toaster popped, interrupting the connection that flowed between them like a current when they both jumped. “Alright,” Hopper said, shaking his hand and sucking on the end of his thumb when he burnt it. “Eggos are up, kiddos. Go wild.”

While the grown-ups talked and gestured and groaned about sleeping arrangements to do with beds and recliners and sofas and the floor (Jonathan and the Chief seemed to be arguing vehemently over who got the floor), Will and El smiled at nothing and piled so much cream and syrup and sweets on their plates that you couldn’t really see the tower of waffles holding it all up anymore. Will pulled a funny face while impersonating Jonathan that made cream shoot out her nose with a snort of laughter.

“You alright over there?” asked Hopper as she coughed, and they both nodded. El wiped her nose with a napkin and they giggled.

Will heard Hopper sigh. Not quite under his breath enough, he muttered to Mom, “Why do I feel like we’ve just ushered in our own demise with those two?”

Joyce caught Will’s eyes and he saw her break into a smile before he hastily looked back to the table, acting occupied with his Eggos.

“Probably with good reason,” she said. “You did just put two plates of pure sugar in front of them.”

* * *

“If you two are done bouncing off the walls,” rumbled Hop from the recliner he’d already collapsed in (Jonathan had not backed down), “go and brush your teeth. And stop flickering the lights, kid. You’ll give yourself a headache.”

El blinked at him, with his hand draped over his eyes in the way that meant he already had one. She realised the lights were dipping low, like candle flames, and then glared at the closest lampshade until the light returned to its usual glow. She hadn’t meant to do that. If she was pulling energy from the electrics, maybe she _was_ tired.

She definitely was, actually. She just didn’t want to admit it. She could curl up on the sofa and be asleep in an instant, but there was still that current of energy between her and Will that made her keep pushing her eyelids open. She didn’t want to break the connection. Didn’t want to risk losing him into smoke and darkness again.

“Sorry, Chief,” said Will, sounding guilty. She frowned at him; not his fault. He didn’t seem to notice.

El found Will a toothbrush and handed it to him, and they washed up for bed. A few times, sleepiness threatened to overtake her, and she had to stop minty drool from dribbling down her shirt. When she slid the bathroom door shut, teeth sparkling clean, Will smiled at her and said, “Goodnight. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She nodded, and he closed her bedroom door behind him, careful not to disturb the already-sleeping Jonathan on her floor. Alone in the main room with Hop, she went around and switched off all the lights until there was just one dimly glowing lamp left on. She tilted her head at Hop, his eyebrows furrowed and partially hidden behind his hand. He used to swallow small white sweets when that kind of expression deepened on his face, with his back turned to her. Trying to hide them. She’d stolen them one day while he was sleeping, and tried one. They were gross, and she spat it out right away – she didn’t know why he’d liked them, but he must have realised how bitter they were after that because he stopped taking them and threw out all the bottles. The extra-strong mints he’d got after weren’t nice, either, though. Those, she’d been offered.

El leaned forward and put a kiss on his forehead, and said, “Better.”

Hop’s hand shifted and he squinted at her with one eye through his fingers. “Where’d you learn that?” he mumbled. It didn’t seem like the kiss had cured his sore head. Kisses were _supposed_ to make it feel better. Weren’t they? Hadn’t someone kissed away a sore knee or a bumped head from her before?

Of course they hadn’t. Not even Mama, in the memory of a dream. That didn’t make any sense. So where _had_ she learned it?

She raised her shoulders. Didn’t know.

“Mmf,” said Hopper, hiding his eyes in shadow again. “Well, thanks, kid. Now get some sleep, alright?”

She nodded and felt for the switch on the last lamp. “Goodnight, Dad.”

“Yeah, g'night.”


End file.
